Unveiling the ROI on digital transformation projects in the Senior Living industry


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Unveiling the ROI on digital transformation projects in the Senior Living industry

By Cubigo | 29 January 2019 | News Product

By Antoine Smets

The Senior Living industry is going through a profound phase of digital transformation. The investments in modern infrastructure, high staff turnover and the arrival of the baby boomer generation are pushing technology into every Senior Living organization. Exciting times ahead, yet many Senior Living providers struggle to secure the much-needed budgets to invest in these new technologies, the major reason being the unclear ROI (return on investment) of these efforts. A deep dive into the business drivers gives us the much-needed insights on how these IT investments are delivering bottom-line results.

Understanding the ROI behind your digital transformation projects is about realising the organizational capabilities that are created as a result of these efforts. With our clients, Cubigo has identified 3 organizational capabilities that deliver a clear ROI for any Senior Living organization.

  • Management technology: digitalizing the communities’ workflows is the most tangible benefit of your digital transformation efforts. Providing residents with the opportunity to order food and other services via a simple-to-use portal increases efficiency and improves the quality of services, and thus the satisfaction of the residents. Yet many organizations fail to transform the way critical processes are managed within their communities. The main reason is that many software packages don’t offer support during the transition phase. It is crucial to avoid double entries and parallel workflows as these create complications for staff and take-away all benefits created by the new technology, resulting in an unclear ROI. The solution is to ensure that any new platform can be integrated into current workflows, and simplify complex processes. For example: having one platform that combines all the services means that staff are able to keep all requests in one place, and avoids multiplying tasks or keeping track of several different apps.
  • Analytics: everyone in the industry agrees that data-driven processes and decision-making are going to be a key organizational capability in the near future. Predictive modeling will enable a more efficient use of the resources, improving occupancy rates and the wellbeing of residents. Nevertheless, few organizations are able to put this vision into practice. The main reason is that they have a silo-ed IT architecture, with unstructured, and thus unusable, data. Another reason is that few organizations are able to process the data they capture. They aren’t able to generate actionable insights that could help them to continuously improve their operations, resulting in a negative ROI. Investing in a platform that not only captures the much-needed data, connects the different silos but also renders the necessary insights will deliver a positive ROI.
  • Diagnostics: identifying improvement opportunities by benchmarking within your communities and establishing best practices will become another key organizational capability. Many Senior Living organizations have difficulties identifying best practices and spreading these across their communities. A platform capturing all transactions in real-time and measuring the satisfaction levels of staff and residents provides your organization with insights to become a top performer. Organizations that have a diagnostics system in place are already outperforming their competitors. Their continuous improvement efforts are driven by unique data assets coming from all their communities. An example: one organization used the data coming from the transportation requests created across their communities to redesign the billable trips. They took the best performing communities in terms of usage and satisfaction levels of the residents and applied these best practices across all their communities. This resulted in a 15% increase in billable trips whilst improving the overall resident satisfaction without an increase in costs.

Building new organizational capabilities is about making the necessary resources available, building new processes and setting the right priorities. The Cubigo platform not only provides you with the new, much needed strengths to unlock the full potential of your digital transformation, but also the step-by-step approach that will help you to have a positive ROI from the start.